US general in Vietnam sought nukes

WASHINGTON — In one of the darkest moments of the Vietnam War, the top U.S. military commander in Saigon activated a plan in early 1968 to move nuclear weapons to South Vietnam until he was overruled by President Lyndon Johnson, according to recently declassified documents cited in a new history of wartime presidential decisions.

The documents reveal a long-secret set of preparations by the commander, Army Gen. William Westmoreland, to have nuclear weapons at hand should U.S. forces find themselves on the brink of defeat at Khe Sanh, one of the fiercest battles of the war.

With the approval of the U.S. commander in the Pacific, Westmoreland had put together a secret operation, code-named Fracture Jaw, that included moving nuclear weapons into South Vietnam so they could be used on short notice against North Vietnamese troops.

Johnson’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow, alerted the president in a memorandum on White House stationery.

The president rejected the plan and ordered a turnaround, according to Tom Johnson, then a young special assistant to the president and note taker at the White House meetings on the issue.

Tom Johnson said in an interview that the president’s fear was “a wider war” in which the Chinese would enter the fray, as they had in Korea in 1950.

The story of how close the United States came to reaching for nuclear weapons in Vietnam is contained in “Presidents of War,” a coming book by presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who found the documents — some of which were quietly declassified two years ago — during his research.